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mini mittens

Today I have a leisure day. A bit of tinkering around the house, a bit of tea and knitting.
During my breakfast surfing I ran across this pattern and one hour later I am writing you to show this:
a mini mitten!it’s only 2,5 cm high, one inch!

The nice thing is you don’t have to fiddle in the round, instead you work to and fro. That’s much nicer when you’re working on the square centimeter.

However, that pattern asks to park the body stitches, do the thumb first, break yarn and attach it to resume body. Then sew sides. fiddly fiddly

In the 45 minutes it took me to learn this pattern and to knit this mini mitten I also figured out a way that suits me better:

I placed the thumbgusset increases at the sides so I could keep the thumbstitches live while I finished the body, as you see here above.

I even kept those thumbstitches live while I closed the top. First a bunch of k2togs to decrease the stitch count. Then pull the yarn through (with a knitting needle because “darn it, I can never find any of my darning needles”)

(I should confess here that I am very fond of handmade mini pincushions and can touch about 7 of them from where I sit right now. They are all filled with pins and needles. None of them tapestry/darning needles. It’s a mystery…)

Here you see the finishing of the top: decrease stitches with k2togs and then pull the yarn through.

Without breaking yarn I worked my way downwards, whilst closing the side, to the thumb where picked up two extra stitches and knit that baby as an i-cord. At that point Noro decided to become a little BIG so the thumb seems also a bit chunky at times. A bit of handling and stretching will fix that, as you see in the top pictures.

After closing the top of the thumb I took the yarn even further down to close the cuff. Now I have a long tail dangling which would be perfect to make another mitten with or to use as a tree decoration or as a book mark. (‘boekenlegger’ in Dutch)

It’s so cute! Other people who have knitted this have done marvellous things: embellish the mitten with stars or make a garland of them.

Well, my work today is done. I’ll be loafing over here the rest of the day, pondering where darning needles go. Probably the same place where left socks go, needle gauges and all those other things you have a million of but can never find when needed. Must be some party they’re having!

ps. the mitten took about 1 gram of wool, that’s about 4 meters of sock yarn.

ps the next day: I thought up an even quicker way: do the i-cord thumb before the body of the mitten. Close the thumb and somehow work the yarn down to its bottom to resume knitting the body. That way, when you arrive at the top of the mitten, you can work your way down and close the side and it’s finished.

3 thoughts on “mini mittens”

it’s great isn’t it? Japanese porcelain from The Japanese Shop in Amsterdam http://japansewinkeltje.nl/
the pot is yellow with a hare on it because it tells a story about the moon. There are also tiny cups with a hare running at the bottom.